Mr. Britling Sees It Through

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

and comfortably, to quarrel with a government and not with a people. It took Mr. Britling at least a couple of months of warfare to understand that the Germans were fighting in an altogether different spirit.

The first intimations of this that struck upon his mind were the news of the behaviour of the Kaiser and the Berlin crowd upon the declaration of war, and the violent treatment of the British subjects seeking to return to their homes. Everywhere such people had been insulted and ill-treated. It was the spontaneous expression of a long-gathered bitterness. While the British ambassador was being howled out of Berlin, the German ambassador to England was taking a farewell stroll, quite unmolested, in St. James’s Park.... One item that struck particularly upon Mr. Britling’s imagination was the story of the chorus of young women who assembled on the railway platform of the station through which the British ambassador was passing to sing – to his drawn blinds –”Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.” Mr. Britling could imagine those young people, probably dressed more or less uniformly in white, with flushed faces and shining eyes, letting their voices go, full throated, in the modern German way....

And then came stories of atrocities, stories of the shooting of old men and the butchery of children by the wayside, stories of wounded men bayoneted or burnt alive, of massacres of harmless citizens, of looting and filthy outrages....

Mr. Britling did his utmost not to believe these things. They contradicted his habitual world. They produced horrible strains in his mind. They might, he hoped, be misreported so as to seem more violent or less justifiable than they were.

331

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS

They might be the acts of stray criminals, and quite disconnected from the normal operations of the war. Here and there some weak-minded officer may have sought to make himself terrible.... And as for the bombardment of cathedrals and the crime of Louvain, well, Mr. Britling was prepared to argue that Gothic architecture is not sacrosanct if military necessity cuts through it.... It was only after the war had been going on some months that Mr. Britling’s fluttering, unwilling mind was pinned down by official reports and a cloud of witnesses to a definite belief in the grim reality of systematic rape and murder, destruction, dirtiness and abominable compulsions that blackened the first rush of the Prussians into Belgium and Champagne....

They came hating and threatening the lands they outraged. They sought occasion to do frightful deeds.... When they could not be frightful in the houses they occupied, then to the best of their ability they were destructive and filthy. The facts took Mr. Britling by the throat....

The first thing that really pierced Mr. Britling with the conviction that there was something essentially different in the English and the German attitude towards the war was the sight of a bale of German comic papers in the study of a friend in London. They were filled with caricatures of the Allies and more particularly of the English, and they displayed a force and quality of passion – an incredible force and quality of passion. Their amazing hate and their amazing filthiness alike overwhelmed Mr. Britling. There was no appearance of national pride or national dignity, but a bellowing patriotism and a limitless desire to hurt and humiliate. They spat. They

332

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

were red in the face and they spat. He sat with these violent sheets in his hands – ashamed.

“But I say!” he said feebly. “It’s the sort of thing that might come out of a lunatic asylum....”

One incredible craving was manifest in every one of them. The German caricaturist seemed unable to represent his enemies except in extremely tight trousers or in none; he was equally unable to represent them without thrusting a sword or bayonet, spluttering blood, into the more indelicate parts of their persons. This was the leit-motif of the war as the German humorists presented it. “But,” said Mr. Britling, “these things can’t represent anything like the general state of mind in Germany.”

“They do,” said his friend.

“But it’s blind fury – at the dirt-throwing stage.”

“The whole of Germany is in that blind fury,” said his friend. “While we are going about astonished and rather incredulous about this war, and still rather inclined to laugh, that’s the state of mind of Germany.... There’s a sort of deliberation in it. They think it gives them strength. They want to foam at the mouth. They do their utmost to foam more. They write themselves up. Have you heard of the ‘Hymn of Hate’?”

Mr. Britling had not.

“There was a translation of it in last week’s Spectator.... This is the sort of thing we are trying to fight in good temper and without extravagance. Listen, Britling!

“You will we hate with a lasting hate; We will never forgo our hate – Hate by water and hate by land,

333

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS

Hate of the head and hate of the hand, Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, Hate of seventy millions, choking down; We love as one, we hate as one,

We have one foe, and one alone – ENGLAND!”

He read on to the end.

“Well,” he said when he had finished reading, “what do you think of it?”

“I want to feel his bumps,” said Mr. Britling after a pause. “It’s incomprehensible.”

“They’re singing that up and down Germany. Lissauer, I hear, has been decorated....”

“It’s – stark malignity,” said Mr. Britling. “What have we done?”

“It’s colossal. What is to happen to the world if these people prevail?”

“I can’t believe it – even with this evidence before me....

No! I want to feel their bumps....”

III

“You see,” said Mr. Britling, trying to get it into focus, “I have known quite decent Germans. There must be some sort of misunderstanding.... I wonder what makes them hate us. There seems to me no reason in it.”

“I think it is just thoroughness,” said his friend. “They are at war. To be at war is to hate.”

334

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

“That isn’t at all my idea.”

“We’re not a thorough people. When we think of anything, we also think of its opposite. When we adopt an opinion we also take in a provisional idea that it is probably nearly as wrong as it is right. We are – atmospheric. They are concrete.... All this filthy, vile, unjust and cruel stuff is honest genuine war. We pretend war does not hurt. They know better.... The Germans are a simple honest people. It is their virtue. Possibly it is their only virtue....”

IV

Mr. Britling was only one of a multitude who wanted to feel the bumps of Germany at that time. The effort to understand a people who had suddenly become incredible was indeed one of the most remarkable facts in English intellectual life during the opening phases of the war. The English state of mind was unlimited astonishment. There was an enormous sale of any German books that seemed likely to illuminate the mystery of this amazing concentration of hostility; the works of Bernhardi, Treitschke, Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, became the material of countless articles and interminable discussions. One saw little clerks on the way to the office and workmen going home after their work earnestly reading these remarkable writers. They were asking, just as Mr. Britling was asking, what it was the British Empire had struck against. They were trying to account for this wild storm of hostility that was coming at them out of Central Europe.

335

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS

It was a natural next stage to this, when after all it became manifest that instead of there being a liberal and reluctant Germany at the back of imperialism and Junkerdom, there was apparently one solid and enthusiastic people, to suppose that the Germans were in some distinctive way evil, that they were racially more envious, arrogant, and aggressive than the rest of mankind. Upon that supposition a great number of English people settled. They concluded that the Germans had a peculiar devil of their own – and had to be treated accordingly. That was the second stage in the process of national apprehension, and it was marked by the first beginnings of a spy hunt, by the first denunciation of naturalised aliens, and by some anti-German rioting among the mixed alien population in the East End. Most of the bakers in the East End of London were Germans, and for some months after the war began they went on with their trade unmolested. Now many of these shops were wrecked.... It was only in October that the British gave these first signs of a sense that they were fighting not merely political Germany but the Germans.

But the idea of a peculiar malignity in the German quality as a key to the broad issue of the war was even less satisfactory and less permanent in Mr. Britling’s mind than his first crude opposition of militarism and a peaceful humanity as embodied respectively in the Central Powers and the RussoWestern alliance. It led logically to the conclusion that the extermination of the German peoples was the only security for the general amiability of the world, a conclusion that appealed but weakly to his essential kindliness. After all, the Germans he had met and seen were neither cruel nor hate-inspired.

336

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

He came back to that obstinately. From the harshness and vileness of the printed word and the unclean picture, he fell back upon the flesh and blood, the humanity and sterling worth, of – as a sample – young Heinrich.

Who was moreover a thoroughly German young German – a thoroughly Prussian young Prussian.

At times young Heinrich alone stood between Mr. Britling and the belief that Germany and the whole German race was essentially wicked, essentially a canting robber nation. Young Heinrich became a sort of advocate for his people before the tribunal of Mr. Britling’s mind. (And on his shoulder sat an absurdly pampered squirrel.) s fresh, pink, sedulous face, very earnest, adjusting his glasses, saying “Please,” intervened and insisted upon an arrest of judgment....

Since the young man’s departure he had sent two postcards of greeting directly to the “Familie Britling,” and one letter through the friendly intervention of Mr. Britling’s American publisher. Once also he sent a message through a friend in Norway. The postcards simply recorded stages in the passage of a distraught pacifist across Holland to his enrolment. The letter by way of America came two months later. He had been converted into a combatant with extreme rapidity. He had been trained for three weeks, had spent a fortnight in hospital with a severe cold, and had then gone to Belgium as a transport driver – his father had been a horse-dealer and he was familiar with horses. “If anything happens to me,” he wrote, “please send my violin at least very carefully to my mother.” It was characteristic that he reported himself as very comfortably quartered in Courtrai with “very nice people.” The nice-

337

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS

ness involved restraints. “Only never,” he added, “do we talk about the war. It is better not to do so.” He mentioned the violin also in the later communication through Norway. Therein he lamented the lost fleshpots of Courtrai. He had been in Posen, and now he was in the Carpathians, up to his knees in snow and “very uncomfortable....”

And then abruptly all news from him ceased. Month followed month, and no further letter came.

“Something has happened to him. Perhaps he is a prisoner....”

“I hope our little Heinrich hasn’t got seriously damaged....

He may be wounded....”

“Or perhaps they stop his letters.... Very probably they stop his letters.”

V

Mr. Britling would sit in his armchair and stare at his fire, and recall conflicting memories of Germany – of a pleasant land, of friendly people. He had spent many a jolly holiday there. So recently as 1911 all the Britling family had gone up the Rhine from Rotterdam, had visited a string of great cities and stayed for a cheerful month of sunshine at Neunkirchen in the Odenwald.

The little village perches high among the hills and woods, and at its very centre is the inn and the linden tree and – Adam Meyer. Or at least Adam Meyer was there. Whether he is there now, only the spirit of change can tell; if he live to be a hundred

338

MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH

no friendly English will ever again come tramping along by the track of the Blaue Breiecke or the Weisse Streiche to enjoy his hospitality; there are rivers of blood between, and a thousand memories of hate....

It was a village distended with hospitalities. Not only the inn but all the houses about the place of the linden tree, the shoe-maker’s, the post-mistress’s, the white house beyond, every house indeed except the pastor’s house, were full of Adam Meyer’s summer guests. And about it and over it went and soared Adam Meyer, seeing they ate well, seeing they rested well, seeing they had music and did not miss the moonlight – a host who forgot profit in hospitality, an inn-keeper with the passion of an artist for his inn.

Music, moonlight, the simple German sentiment, the hearty German voices, the great picnic in a Stuhl Wagen, the orderly round games the boys played with the German children, and the tramps and confidences Hugh had with Kurt and Karl, and at last a crowning jollification, a dance, with some gipsy musicians whom Mr. Britling discovered, when the Germans taught the English various entertaining sports with baskets and potatoes and forfeits and the English introduced the Germans to the licence of the two-step. And everybody sang “Britannia, Rule the Waves,” and “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” and Adam Meyer got on a chair and made a tremendous speech more in dialect than ever, and there was much drinking of beer and sirops in the moonlight under the linden....

Afterwards there had been a periodic sending of postcards and greetings, which indeed only the war had ended.

339

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS

Right pleasant people those Germans had been, sun and green-leaf lovers, for whom “Frisch Auf” seemed the most natural of national cries. Mr. Britling thought of the individual Germans who had made up the assembly, of the men’s amusingly fierce little hats of green and blue with an inevitable feather thrust perkily into the hatband behind, of the kindly plumpnesses behind their turned-up moustaches, of the blonde, sedentary women, very wise about the comforts of life and very kind to the children, of their earnest pleasure in landscape and Art and Great Writers, of their general frequent desire to sing, of their plasticity under the directing hands of Adam Meyer. He thought of the mellow south German landscape, rolling away broad and fair, of the little clean red-roofed townships, the old castles, the big prosperous farms, the neatly marked pedestrian routes, the hospitable inns, and the artless abundant Aussichtthurms....

He saw all those memories now through a veil of indescribable sadness – as of a world lost, gone down like the cities of Lyonesse beneath deep seas....

Right pleasant people in a sunny land! Yet here pressing relentlessly upon his mind were the murders of Visé, the massacres of Dinant, the massacres of Louvain, murder red-handed and horrible upon an inoffensive people, foully invaded, foully treated; murder done with a sickening cant of righteousness and racial pretension....

The two pictures would not stay steadily in his mind together. When he thought of the broken faith that had poured those slaughtering hosts into the decent peace of Belgium,

340